Ricardo Jones is a natural birth obstetrician from Brazil. Together with his wife, Neusa Jones, an obstetrics nurse, they have delivered more than 2,000 babies.
But for their work, they are facing stiff reprisals.
On March 27, a Brazilian court convicted Ricardo Jones of first-degree murder for the death of a baby he delivered at home 15 years ago. The baby died of congenital pneumonia in the hospital 24 hours after his birth. The court sentenced Jones to 14 years in prison. His wife, Neusa, who helped in the birth, was sentenced to 11 years as an accomplice. Jones spent three weeks in jail. He is now out, while he and Neusa await the decision over their appeal. A group of midwives, doulas, parents, and birth activists has launched a campaign in his defense.
“He challenged the violent hospital system [and that] is now being used as an example to silence us and prevent women from having the right to choose their births,” read one post circulated on the social media profiles of many of those involved. They say Ricardo and Neusa Jones are being demonized in order to tarnish the work of natural-birth midwives in Brazil and send a message that they need to leave the birthing to the hospitals and the obstetricians. When the judge issued the ruling, she said that she hoped this would help stop home births in Brazil, forever.
It’s an emblematic case. Brazil has one of the highest c-section rates in the world — 57 percent last year in the public sector and almost 90 percent in private clinics. The World Health Organization recommends that c-section rates should be closer to 15 percent, as c-sections (when not done for necessary health reasons) increase the likelihood of morbidity and mortality threefold.
This interview took place over WhatsApp in late April. It has been lightly edited for clarity.
Michael Fox: Why did you take this path within childbirth care?
Ricardo Jones: Well, I became a father very early. When I was 21, I had my first child while I was still in medical school. The birth of my two children, both vaginally delivered in hospitals (especially the first one), showed me all the possible forms of obstetric violence, despite the good intentions of the professionals involved. I realized how deeply cruel the system was and how it determined procedures that had no scientific basis and that produced much more harm than good.
Over time, I began to research alternative forms of childbirth care. The first book I read was called Learn to Be Born With the Indians by a Brazilian obstetrician named Moysés Paciornik. In this fabulous book, it became very clear that the position women adopt when being attended to during childbirth – lying on their backs on a stretcher in a delivery room (the supine position)– was created in modern times only to facilitate intervention and manipulation by doctors, without any advantage to the mothers. All the studies and research carried out on the dynamics of childbirth showed how useless, unnecessary, humiliating, and harmful the supine position was to the birth of babies. Reading this book, I realized for the first time that the basic structure of contemporary obstetrics was based on disregard for women’s innate ability to give birth to their children safely.
Based on this initial observation, I began to analyze other obstetric routines in light of the ideas of an American anthropologist specializing in human reproduction named Robbie Davis-Floyd, who demonstrated that the way we care for women during pregnancy and childbirth follows a rite of passage that, in the task of transforming women into mothers, assigns them a position of submission in society, subject to the determinations of the men who control them. Childbirth, seen from this perspective, proves to be a fantastic window of opportunity to determine the specific position of women in patriarchal society, for better or for worse. The dominance of technology in childbirth shows the tendency of contemporary societies to negatively evaluate the physiology of human birth. Furthermore, it sees women’s bodies as defective, faulty, and untrustworthy machines.
My entire career in obstetrics had been guided by a questioning, both theoretical and practical, of the constitutive bases of contemporary obstetrics, centered on the figure of the doctor (and not professional midwives), focused on pathologies (and not on normality), and applied only in hospitals (and not on the preferential choice of women). This model ends up producing unsatisfactory results when compared to models of care during childbirth that have midwives, freedom of choice, and a commitment to physiology as the most important assistants in the process, which guarantee women full protagonism in childbirth.
My travels to various parts of the world, from small Brazilian cities to Mexico, the United States, Bulgaria, China, etc., have given me the opportunity to discover new ways of caring for this phenomenon. More than that, experiences outside the technocratic context have shown how essential it is to rethink how we bring children into the world and to review how much harm has been caused by the technocratic adventure taken to its ultimate consequences. Based on this experience, I established an original model of care in my city based on a three-pronged team of professionals who would care for patients from prenatal consultations to the immediate postpartum period. It consisted of an obstetrician, an obstetric nurse, and a doula. This model has been the subject of studies and publications in books launched by professionals from both the United States and England, in addition to being the main material I used in the publication of my two books on the subject.
MF: Why the persecution? Why are you being singled out?
RJ: It is not difficult to understand that an obstetrician who denounces the “c-section cartel” and points the finger at the open wound of obstetric violence would be quickly recognized as a “traitor” by his peers. However, I have always kept in mind that a doctor’s first commitment is to the health and well-being of his patient, and not to his colleagues, hospitals, or hegemonic doctrines. This care is even more special for healthy clients such as pregnant women, who seek safety, respect, and a good experience during pregnancy, childbirth, and the great adventure of motherhood.
The aggressions against me have ranged from the most subtle, in meetings within the hospital and in the gossip that arose in this environment, created and disseminated by colleagues, with their unwillingness to assist in surgeries, and later, in a more gross and explicit form, when anesthesiologists refused to treat patients undergoing “humanized childbirth” because they made “excessive demands” or were “uncooperative.”
Not only have my social media posts, my articles, my lectures, the documentaries I starred in, and the books I wrote been met with hatred and contempt by those linked to the “c-section cartel,” [the medical industry in Brazil that is pushing c-sections over vaginal births] but especially the fact that in a hospital where professionals performed 90 percent of births by c-section, our team achieved levels of between 16 and 20 percent. This was a slap in the face to the c-section specialists, a success that was unbearable for them, as it called their own practices into question. The “actual” confirmation that it was possible to meet the numbers recommended by the WHO was unbearable for an ideological model that believed in the opposite: modern, weak, and sedentary women could only give birth safely if it were through the overt intervention of medical art. In other words: Saving them from their disastrous maternal destiny.
MF: What stage is the case against you at now?
RC: The jury trial took place in March, and the sentence was issued on March 27, 2025. In this trial, the prosecution’s arguments were dismantled through testimonies from a group of prestigious professionals who demonstrated the error of each one of them. However, the prosecution used emotional tactics to attack the professionals, and not the case under discussion. In the final debates, practically nothing was said about the testimony filled with lies and gross technical errors used by the only expert called by the prosecution.
Humanized childbirth — a project adopted by the World Health Organization, the Pan American Health Organization and the Brazilian Ministry of Health itself — was treated by members of the Public Prosecutor’s Office as an “exotic ideology,” the narcissistic project of a doctor, something that put the lives of women and their children at risk. No evidence of this was presented, but the jury — composed of six women and one man! — decided that the birth at home (which the mother always insisted on herself) and the calm handling of events there were the cause of the baby’s death. Meanwhile, the consensus among all those who evaluated the case was that the death was due to congenital pneumonia. Extremely serious. Probably untreatable, but where the errors committed by the hospital’s team of neonatologists contributed to the tragic end.
The result was an absurd sentence of 14 years in prison (the same sentence I would have received if I had entered the hospital and shot the baby dead) and immediate imprisonment (even before the final conviction). For nurse Neusa (my wife and partner in care) the sentence was 11 years, but with the benefit of awaiting the other instances in freedom. After 21 days in prison, I was granted permission to await the next stages at home, which is where I am now.
MF: Why is this fight against the criminalization of home births so important at an international level?
RC: First, the fight is not against home births; the fight is against childbirth in any of its forms. Planned home births – which had no influence whatsoever on the outcome of this birth and only avoided the harmful effects of hospital care during labor – have been the target of medical technocracy for decades, even though international literature consistently warns that they have the same risks as those provided in hospitals. Since doctors entered the birth scene, which began around a century ago, displacing midwives from their age-old role, it has become clear that vaginal births disrupt the structures of control over birth.
Natural births, in their natural form, occur at any time and prevent rigid control of timing, both by hospitals and professionals. The beginning of labor is determined by the baby itself, which activates its signaling hormones so that the mother slowly begins her expulsive movements. These phenomena do not occur under the control of doctors’ clocks, but by the designs of physiology, and this disrupts vacations, weekends, nights, early mornings, holidays, office hours, rest, leisure, etc. It is no wonder that, when a patient has a private obstetrician who must leave his home to attend to her at the hospital, cesarean rates approach 100 percent. However, when this care is provided in a hospital, where there are doctors on call 24 hours a day, the results drop significantly, by half (and are still high). Robbie Davis-Floyd warned that when doctors talk about “safety,” what they actually mean is “control.”
The results of this attack on natural childbirth and home birth are countless – and tragic. If this trend is not reversed, there will be few obstetricians left capable and qualified to attend natural childbirth. This phenomenon already occurs with breech births (babies in a sitting position) and twin births (birth of twins), where it is almost impossible to find obstetricians who have the knowledge and experience to provide care. The criminalization of natural childbirth is an international phenomenon and is in line with the interests of the medical industry, which controls childbirth care in the West, and hospital institutions, the pharmaceutical industry, etc. that profit from longer hospital stays, drug use, beds, dressings, health insurance, ICU stays, etc. In other words, all those who profit from the “wheel of fortune” of capitalism involved in healthcare.
The risk we run is the complete artificialization of birth, where no child will be born through the efforts and determination of his or her mother, but through the time and skills of a third party, who will do it according to their interests.
Therefore, cases of ideological persecution of childbirth professionals need to be responded to vigorously and transparently, preventing this type of violence from becoming common practice and making childbirth care work unfeasible.
Michael Fox is a Latin America-based multimedia journalist and host of the podcasts Brazil on Fire, Under the Shadow and Stories of Resistance. He was previously editor of NACLA. You can find more of his work on his Patreon.